Migrant money could be keeping Nicaragua’s uprising alive

October 15, 2018 6.29am EDT

Costa Ricans held a march in solidarity with Nicaraguan refugees on Aug. 25, 2018. An estimated 500,000 Nicaraguans live in Costa Rica, with more arriving daily as crisis in the country deepens.
Reuters/Juan Carlos Ulate

Migrant money could be keeping Nicaragua’s uprising alive

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Benjamin Waddell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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The Central American country has been embroiled in deadly political turmoil for months. Demonstrations that began in April against an unpopular social security reform quickly transformed into a broader movement aimed at ousting Ortega, Nicaragua’s authoritarian president.

Instead, the president in late September banned protests entirely. Thity-eight Nicaraguans were arrested on Oct. 14 for planning to march against their government.

Ortega’s rise to power

Ortega, a former revolutionary leftist who ruled Nicaragua in the 1980s, returned to office in 2007. Over the past 11 years, he has grown ever more autocratic, abolishing presidential term limits, enriching his family and restricting civil liberties.

The common wisdom is that Ortega enjoyed such a long and, until now, uncontested reign because Nicaragua’s economy boomed under his stewardship, in part due to cheap and plentiful oil supplied by Hugo Chávez.

According to this theory, the growth allowed his government to pay for extensive anti-poverty programs, earning him widespread popularity in the Western Hemisphere’s second-poorest country – until the economy began to stagnate last year.

But that’s not the whole story behind Ortega’s long rise and sudden unpopularity.

While Nicaragua has prospered financially under his leadership, my research finds that migrants living in Costa Rica, the U.S. and Spain also greatly boosted the domestic economy by sending home millions of dollars each year.

Roughly 16 percent of the country’s population lives abroad. Their remittances, which last year totaled US$1.4 billion, have fueled consumption and tempered political pressure on Ortega’s government to reduce poverty.

As she points out, “It costs a family of four about $400 a month to get by, but the minimum wage is only $177 a month here.”

Juana the florist

Take the case of 70-year-old Juana Jiménez, a single mother who in the mid-1990s received a U.S. work visa – her “gift from God” – and worked as a florist in Miami for nearly 20 years.

The $200 to $300 a month that Jiménez sent home covered medical expenses for her son Erik, who was born with severe disabilities, and saw her family through Nicaragua’s leanest post-revolutionary years.

Remittances, in both Nicaragua and other developing countries, have social benefits beyond keeping individual households out of poverty. Research shows that in such countries they have contributed to reductions in poverty, helped increase access to health care and improved school attendance by freeing children from the need to work.

Rather than complement government programs in those places, however, research shows that all to often, migrant remittances actually replace them.

For example, scholars Gary Goodman and Jonathan T. Hiskey have found that, in Mexico, local governments often reduce their expenditures in areas that consistently receive remittances from abroad.

And as remittances increase, electoral participation in democratic countries with high migration tends to decline. Rather than lobby public officials to upgrade their health clinic, say, or pave a road, citizens may look to the relatively well-off diaspora for solutions.

For a decade, the dual domestic impacts of international migration – economic growth and diminished citizen pressure – proved a winning combination for Ortega.

But then his government responded to April’s uprising with deadly repression.

According to political scientist Idean Salehyan, an expert in transnational rebellions, more than 50 percent of all national uprisings after World War II – including those in Cuba, Ireland, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – were spearheaded by insurgents abroad.

That’s because migrants do not just change their home countries financially. They also influence the way local residents think.

Nicaraguan expats protesting the Ortega government outside the Organization of American States headquarters in Washington on June 4, 2018.AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin